The Witcher 4 release date may not be as far off as you think. CD Projekt Red has earned a reputation with some for taking a long time to develop games and revealing them very early on, but none of these beliefs are based on much. Cyberpunk 2077 was announced eight years before it was released. If this is your only point of reference, it’s easy to think CD Projekt Red will be announcing their games well in advance of release. However, Cyberpunk 2077 is a one-time promotion for the Polish developer. CD Projekt Red has announced both The Witcher 2 and The Witcher 3 two years before they were released, which is of course more representative of your standard AAA release.
Cyberpunk 2077 also gives players the impression that CD Projekt Red takes a long time to develop a game, but again, it is misleading. While Cyberpunk 2077 was announced in 2012, it didn’t enter pre-production until mid-2016, with good development with a properly sized team starting even later. Meanwhile, The Witcher 3 was made in about three and a half years The Witcher 2 was made in a similar amount of time.
What does this have to do with The Witcher 4Well, this week, CD Projekt Red announced that it will start developing new ones Cyberpunk and Witcher games starting in 2022. If this is the case, it probably would mean The Witcher 4 – or whatever the project is called – will be released in 2025 or 2026 given the above timelines. Working backwards would suggest that the game will be unveiled sometime in 2023 or 2024 if it will have a similar reveal to release schedule as previous entries.
What we know is it won’t have a huge gap between reveal and release Cyberpunk 2077, as CD Projekt Red also confirmed this week that it wants to shorten its approach in this regard, or in other words, reveal its games when they get closer to release.
Now take all this speculation with a grain of salt, because that’s all, speculation. It’s not completely baseless speculation, though, and beyond Cyberpunk 2077, CD Projekt Red is probably itching to move on and get back to its bread and butter.